Sunday, November 1, 2009

NetApp Insight 2009!

Just letting everyone know that I'm heading to NetApp Insight in Phoenix, AZ this week. I'm very excited to attend this conference! I managed to get into every session I wanted and the information should be very valuable.

I will be posting articles based on any NDA information that I can pass along but I won't be posting articles until later in the week or early next week. I will updating Twitter so if you aren't already following me, please follow me on Twitter here. While I'm at Insight I am going to try to take a few certification exams so I will be studying in my free time this week. I had hoped to study more beforehand but my schedule just hasn't allowed me to do that.

On a sidenote, I will finally get around to installing the VSC in the next day or two as I'm upgrading our virtual center to 4.0 today.

Up to this point, I've been aware of setting ESX and other host timeouts for NetApp cluster failover, usually via the HUK tools. However, I've completely missed checking the individual VM timeout settings within the guest os. I guess the VSC can help with this inside its "Tools" page. Fortunately, the release of the VSC tool and a blog post by Jason Boche brought this timeout setting to my attention!http://www.boche.net/blog/index.php/2009/10/29/vmware-esx-guest-os-io-timeout-settings-for-netapp-storage-systems/

Hello Leif - I believe it is very important to set the timeouts at the virtual machine level, especially in a NetApp clustered (dual controller) environment.

The reason for the increased timeout settings is to give one controller time to fail over to the other controller. If you don't set the timeouts, you increase chances that the virtual machines will blue screen because the I/O was paused for so long that it believes the hard drives are gone and panics.